A Point of Inspiration
There are probably quite enough registers, superintended in many cases by registrars, in the world already and one hesitates to suggest another; yet there must be a case for creating a comprehensive record of places where moments of inspiration occurred.
On platform one at Derby railway station there's a modest plaque which claims this as the spot where Joseph Paxton conceived the idea for the Crystal Palace. There are probably quite enough registers, superintended in many cases by registrars, in the world already and one hesitates to suggest another; yet there must be a case for creating a comprehensive record of places where such moments of inspiration occurred.
They tend to be called eureka moments nowadays, and perhaps the new registrar might even be able to put up a plaque to mark the spot where the term eureka moment was coined. The first sighting in the Guardian archives is a piece by Alex Hamilton, in this newspaper, in 1991.This was followed by two references in the newspapers monitored in the archive during 1994, four in 1995, 23 in 2000, 58 last year, and just under 50 in the first seven months of this one.
When the registrar sets up in business I shall send in my modest collection of inspirational moments culled from the press and filled out by my polymath colleague Tim Radford, and the writer and programme maker on science Karl Sabbagh. When I saw the plaque at Derby it occurred to me that such moments quite often occur during travel, and Radford confirms that Eratosthenes of Alexandria concluded the world was a sphere when he noticed that visiting Cyrene on the day of the summer solstice in or around 240BC, he cast no shadow, whereas he had cast a decided shadow in Alexandria on the very same day of the previous year.
Paxton was not in motion when his moment of breakthrough occurred, merely waiting on the station for a train to London; but the spectacle of high-velocity trains rushing past may have stimulated his powers of imagination. A recent TV programme movingly recreated the moment when Stephen Hawking climbed off a train to chalk on the platform of Cambridge station a diagram of his brand new conception of how life began; though some claim that this version is an embroidery of the truth. Karl Sabbagh's recent book on the Riemann hypothesis, described as the greatest unsolved problem in mathematics, discusses a proof produced by a mathematician called Louis de Branges, a key step of which came to him on a railway platform at Gif-sur-Yvelle. Nor is the humble bus to be excluded. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré, Sabbagh tells us in the same book, described in a lecture how, having spent restless nights trying to prove the non-existence of Fuschian functions, suddenly thought of the answer as he put his foot on the step of a bus taking him to Coutances.
Leo Szilard was on foot, waiting to cross the road at the junction of Russell Square and Southampton Row in London, when his breakthrough happened. "It suddenly occurred to me," he recalled, "that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons, and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbs one, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a chain reaction." That eureka moment helped give us the nuclear bomb.
We know rather more about such moments than we did, since in April this year neuroscientists in the US discovered that breakthrough moments were accompanied by bursts of tell-tale neural activity in the right hemisphere of the brain. As Tim Radford reported then: "Most of the laborious thinking activity seemed to be in the brain's left hemisphere. But the aha! moment was recorded in the right temporal lobe, in a region called the anterior superior temporal gyrus." Edward Bowden of Northwestern University, Illinois, explained the process in terms which nearly match the case of Poincaré. "People often reach an impasse and are not able to make any progress. They need to interpret and integrate information in a new way. Sometimes the mind does this unconsciously and then the solution suddenly appears in the conscious. To the solver, the solution seems to have come out of thin air, yet it is obviously correct."
The conclusion of all this is obvious: more research is needed. But I guess that the registrar may challenge the view that beneficial activity in the anterior superior temporal gyrus is habitually spurred by locomotion. When Archimedes hit on his brilliant deduction about the displacement of water he was lying still in his bath. True, the story says that violent motion ensued as he leapt out and ran naked into the street crying "eureka"; yet the notion was born in tranquillity. And maybe, I have to admit, Paxton too was sitting quite still when the vision of a crystal palace swept through him on Derby station.
They tend to be called eureka moments nowadays, and perhaps the new registrar might even be able to put up a plaque to mark the spot where the term eureka moment was coined. The first sighting in the Guardian archives is a piece by Alex Hamilton, in this newspaper, in 1991.This was followed by two references in the newspapers monitored in the archive during 1994, four in 1995, 23 in 2000, 58 last year, and just under 50 in the first seven months of this one.
When the registrar sets up in business I shall send in my modest collection of inspirational moments culled from the press and filled out by my polymath colleague Tim Radford, and the writer and programme maker on science Karl Sabbagh. When I saw the plaque at Derby it occurred to me that such moments quite often occur during travel, and Radford confirms that Eratosthenes of Alexandria concluded the world was a sphere when he noticed that visiting Cyrene on the day of the summer solstice in or around 240BC, he cast no shadow, whereas he had cast a decided shadow in Alexandria on the very same day of the previous year.
Paxton was not in motion when his moment of breakthrough occurred, merely waiting on the station for a train to London; but the spectacle of high-velocity trains rushing past may have stimulated his powers of imagination. A recent TV programme movingly recreated the moment when Stephen Hawking climbed off a train to chalk on the platform of Cambridge station a diagram of his brand new conception of how life began; though some claim that this version is an embroidery of the truth. Karl Sabbagh's recent book on the Riemann hypothesis, described as the greatest unsolved problem in mathematics, discusses a proof produced by a mathematician called Louis de Branges, a key step of which came to him on a railway platform at Gif-sur-Yvelle. Nor is the humble bus to be excluded. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré, Sabbagh tells us in the same book, described in a lecture how, having spent restless nights trying to prove the non-existence of Fuschian functions, suddenly thought of the answer as he put his foot on the step of a bus taking him to Coutances.
Leo Szilard was on foot, waiting to cross the road at the junction of Russell Square and Southampton Row in London, when his breakthrough happened. "It suddenly occurred to me," he recalled, "that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons, and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbs one, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a chain reaction." That eureka moment helped give us the nuclear bomb.
We know rather more about such moments than we did, since in April this year neuroscientists in the US discovered that breakthrough moments were accompanied by bursts of tell-tale neural activity in the right hemisphere of the brain. As Tim Radford reported then: "Most of the laborious thinking activity seemed to be in the brain's left hemisphere. But the aha! moment was recorded in the right temporal lobe, in a region called the anterior superior temporal gyrus." Edward Bowden of Northwestern University, Illinois, explained the process in terms which nearly match the case of Poincaré. "People often reach an impasse and are not able to make any progress. They need to interpret and integrate information in a new way. Sometimes the mind does this unconsciously and then the solution suddenly appears in the conscious. To the solver, the solution seems to have come out of thin air, yet it is obviously correct."
The conclusion of all this is obvious: more research is needed. But I guess that the registrar may challenge the view that beneficial activity in the anterior superior temporal gyrus is habitually spurred by locomotion. When Archimedes hit on his brilliant deduction about the displacement of water he was lying still in his bath. True, the story says that violent motion ensued as he leapt out and ran naked into the street crying "eureka"; yet the notion was born in tranquillity. And maybe, I have to admit, Paxton too was sitting quite still when the vision of a crystal palace swept through him on Derby station.
Use the feedback form below to submit your comments.
Use the form below to email this article to your friends.
